The Blog of Actor/Impressionist Jim Meskimen

Okay, so here we are, living our lives, doing our jobs, doing our best… and yet if you are incautious enough to give it a moment’s thought, you have to ask yourself, where in the hell is this train headed?

These days even the most tough, never say die, “put a bold face on it” friends of mine are uneager to mouth the usual platitudes like, “It’ll all work out in the end”, or “It’s just a phase”, or even “it could be worse.” I tell you, I find myself expending quite a bit of energy these days making sure I don’t meditate on the theme of “Could it be worse?” or “Exactly how MUCH worse could it get?” That way madness lies!

In fact, that seems like one of the legacies of these days, the production of a whole new crop of convincing, yet non-specific platitudes to take the place of expressions that used to be a kind of safe harbor. Maybe we’ll start saying to one another things like, “Well, nobody detonated a bomb in my yard today, so I guess I’m doing pretty good”, “Not talking to you through barbed wire, am I?”, “Any day you don’t have to sell your family’s blood to buy groceries is a swell day in my book”. You know. Keeping it light.

But it is a nagging computation that keeps running in the abstract problem solving section of my mind: what is going to become of mankind at mankind’s hands? It comes up like an annoying pop up ad on my mental desktop, usually when I least want it to, like at 3 in the morning.

Okay, GIVEN: The politicians have sold out long ago. They aren’t even trying to put up a good front. The media are owned by somebody who couldn’t care less if you live or die. The Banks, well, they are a strange breed of Uber Vampire that have developed the ability to walk around during the day or night, draining anything with a heartbeat of every life-sustaining droplet. The police state keeps on gearing up and developing new means of tracking normal people, “protecting” us through more and more super control.

Protecting us, for example, from hoummus.

Hoummus, that thick, Middle Eastern chickpea spread that tastes great on pita, is a suspicious enough substance that the TSA confiscated a container of it from my 18 year old daughter at the airport recently. Explosive? Maybe if you eat it with melon.

It’s easy to cogitate on things like this and shortly find yourself babbling. And of course nobody wants to look like a “conspiracy theorist nut job”. But which is worse? To look like a nut, or to fail to ask the impertinent questions while one still can?

The needs and wants of ordinary people aren’t terribly hard to understand. Decent, normal folks want to live, work at a meaningful job, raise a family, enjoy something of the life we share on planet earth, and grow to a ripe old age, shuffling off the mortal coil in a stress-free, painless and dignified manner.

We’d like to see a bit of the world, enjoy exotic foods. Make friends of interesting and entertaining people, talk over things with them, learn their language or at least see thru their eye for a while, to compare it to what we have gathered. We’d like to enjoy beauty, and the creative parts of life. We’d like to have a chance, at least, to maybe do something to leave our own little positive mark on the world, even if it is just a better looking front yard, or to have the garage cleaned up at last.

Who wants to be a slave? No one. For that matter, who would want a slave? Only the mentally toasted. And yet, if you listen close, late at night, the soft rumbling of trucks delivering the slave economy are rolling into town, setting up the equipment and hauling out the manifests.

What the hell for? Is that a game worth playing? Rule by force? Was Rome a good game? Maybe it made a good B movie, but a broad activity for modern, thinking people? C’mon! Aren’t we light-years beyond that?

Could it even be done? Could a whole population of a planet be enslaved? Count on it. Oh, maybe not every single person, fine. Maybe a small covey of Finlanders will escape it, and live off of black market yogurt for a few generations. But earth as a multi-cultural sanctuary will be over.

Okay, so. So what can one do, provided one agrees with the premise?

Let us DO something about this. Let’s acknowledge this… ENTHUSIASM for slavery whenever we see it, for what it is. When the poor scared souls who feel that mankind is too threatening to be allowed a free existence in the world clamp down on yet another basic human right, or make it difficult for a man to be productive, or control his own destiny, or help another human being, or labor without unjust, arbitrary limitations that slow his progress down to nothing, let us say “Got it.” “Thank you very much, I see what you are doing. Enough. THANK YOU. That’s IT.”

It’s the same weapon mothers use to quell childish rebellion. “THANK YOU, Bernard, now please get off the mantle.”

And let’s not forget to acknowledge it in ourselves, in our own thinking and acting; are we acting like enslaved people, tacitly agreeing with the “inevitable”? Acknowledge it and BANISH the thought.

People are too good to be slaves. We are natively free. To enslave is a short term, destructive waste of resources and an unaesthetic, chaotic, brutal mess, long proven to be of no use whatsoever.

Freedom is the bright thing, the desired and also the effective thing, for only in freedom do we find alignment with the basic intentions and personal goals of the individual.

No slave will fight and die and risk all for a slave master. Any production you obtain from them will be of the smallest fraction of the quality that they could achieve.

Hello? It’s BAD for BUSINESS.

So, let’s acknowledge, and stridently, those who try and enforce enslavement of any kind, and work toward greater and greater freedom. Everywhere. Give it a big acknowledgement, too, so that they can really hear it: “THANKS, but NO THANKS.”

And in the stunned silence that follows, start to put there a culture of mutual respect, based on kindness, understanding and help. Using that as mortar, we will have something that will support the positive efforts of the billions, and give them a solid foundation for mutual survival.

The other stuff, that slave mentality, that GOO, wouldn’t hold together a Roach Motel.